Changing UK's Copyright Laws

A study by Bournemouth University recently found that amateur parody videos make the originals more popular and profitable. The research was commissioned by the Intellectual Property Office, the official government body responsible for granting Intellectual Property rights in the UK, and the results have been used to propose a new copyright exception to allow parody. Key findings:

There is no evidence for economic harm to rightsholders.

The audience size for parody is smaller than the audience for originals; the audience of all parody videos added together accounted for less than 1% of the total audience for the original.

There is a growing market for this type of online parody; parody videos in the study generated up to £2 million in revenue, a portion of which was shared with creators and rightsholders.